Wokeness Makes For a Mixed Season at MASS MoCA

This week I’m not venturing far, so I’ll write about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, a little east of my home in ye olde Vermont and the biggest contemporary art museum in the world. MASS MoCA’s a miracle. It started in the mid-1980s as the sad husk of a just-closed, 300,000-square-foot factory with two dozen 19th-century brick buildings on 24 acres in little North Adams in the rural, northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Sprague Electric Company, a capacitator and circuit pioneer and the region’s biggest employer, once filled it. In the early ’80s, its employees tried to unionize. The family-owned company said, Unionize, and we’re outta here. They unionized, and within months the factory closed, leaving thousands unemployed and Massachusetts’s smallest city in a Slough of Despond, surrounded by mountains signaling You’re Trapped.